A Bit About Me

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Guiding Principles

We make meaning through stories.
Stories aren't only the ones we write or tell. They're also the patterns, interpretations, memories, and beliefs through which we understand ourselves and the world.

Greater awareness creates greater choice.
We can't consciously choose something we can't yet see. When our perspective expands, possibilities often appear that weren't available to us before.

You already carry wisdom within you.
I don't believe another person gets to tell you who you are supposed to become. Sometimes the work is learning how to hear your own voice beneath fear, expectation, old patterns, and everybody else's opinions.

Belonging to yourself comes first.
Connection matters deeply to me—but belonging that requires abandoning yourself comes at too high a price. The more fully we can inhabit ourselves, the more authentically we can connect with other people.

One Life, Many Chapters

For a long time, my life felt like a collection of unrelated chapters.

I’ve been a bookkeeper, coach, chaplain, actor, improviser, public speaker, writer, storyteller, Appalachian Trail thru-hiker—and probably a few things I’m forgetting. I used to look at that list and wonder why I couldn’t simply pick a lane and stay in it.

For years, I thought my path had been unusually meandering. Now I think the meandering was part of the point.

Coaching became an important turning point for me—not simply because I learned how to coach other people, but because I eventually experienced the work deeply myself. I had losses to sort through, old understandings of myself to reconsider, and a life that did not look quite the way I once expected it to.

Somewhere in that process, I found my way back to creativity.

And I began recognizing something about myself that had been there all along: I make connections. I notice relationships between things that initially appear unrelated. I pull ideas from one world into another. I like finding the common thread and asking what becomes possible when we stop insisting that everything stay in its own tidy category.

That realization changed the way I understood my own life.

Bookkeeping taught me to work with structure, resources, and reality. Coaching taught me to listen beneath the obvious answer. Acting and improv taught me presence, perspective, and the willingness to follow something unexpected. Writing and storytelling give me a place to explore transformation, meaning, and the wonderfully complicated business of being human.

They aren't separate careers I somehow need to justify anymore.

They're different ways I explore the same questions:

What story are we living inside? What else could be true? And what becomes possible when we have more room to choose?

That is the work I want to keep doing—in my own stories and alongside the people who invite me into theirs.

The Less Official Version

On the Appalachian Trail, I was Patchouli—a trail name I acquired while thru-hiking more than 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine. Spending months walking through the woods turns out to be a reasonably effective way to collect stories, meet fascinating humans, and discover that you are capable of considerably more than you thought.

I am an enthusiastic animal lover and share my life with cats who remain unimpressed by professional credentials.

My relationship with faith has also done plenty of wandering. These days, I think of it less as having arrived at all the correct answers and more as continuing to wrestle with God. I've deconstructed, reconstructed, questioned, changed my mind, and resisted putting everything back together the way someone else thinks I should. Whatever my faith becomes, I want it to actually be mine.

That probably describes much of my life.

I've never been particularly good at staying inside one prescribed box. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that perhaps the solution wasn't to finally locate the correct box.

Maybe I was supposed to make connections between them.